But the productivity slowdown was always going to be temporary, despite RBA governor Glenn Stevens' fear that it was the outcome of a more relaxed attitude to productivity-enhancing reforms.

"I think I have said once or twice before that when times are good we do tend a little bit to not press as hard on some of those reforms as we might," he told a parliamentary committee in August last year.

But more obvious explanations were always available.

The mining sector and parts of the economy feeding off its boom found higher commodity prices suddenly made less productive ventures profitable.

And so a lot of work was done for little immediate productive reward.

In the utilities sector, notably electricity, the ability of distributors to pay for so-called "gold-plated" networks by simply passing on the costs to their customers meant their cost of capital was negligible.

Under such circumstances, even the least productive projects can get the go-ahead.

Those two sectors alone have stripped 0.3 percentage points from annual labour productivity growth in the market sector of the economy - the past of the economy where productivity can be measured meaningfully - since the mining boom began.

But there was another key factor.

Aside from utilities and mining, economic growth in the market sector slowed dramatically, thanks to a series of external shocks - floods, Cyclone Yasi, Japan's tsunami, the global and euro-area financial crises.

And the commodity price boom made matters worse by pushing the Australian dollar higher.

As a result, growth in these "slow lane" sectors averaged GDP growth of just 2.8 per cent a year from 2003/04 to 2010/11, compared with a 4.4 per cent rate of growth in the preceding seven years.

Appealing as the "we've grown complacent" explanation may be, the slowdown in annual labour productivity growth from 3.2 per cent to 1.1 per cent over the same timeframe needed no additional explanation than that slowdown in economic growth.

Subsequent events just confirmed that.

GDP grew by an above-average 3.7 per cent through the year to the June quarter, and labour productivity followed suit with an above-average 2.9 per cent surge.

"Labour productivity across the economy as a whole had increased at an above-average pace over the past year," the RBA said in the minutes of its October 2 monetary policy meeting released on Tuesday.

But that's just what usually happens when the economy grows at an above-average pace.